Poor college grades may mean repayment of tuition assistance

Troops may begin to think twice before tapping tuition assistance benefits starting this fall when new Pentagon rules will require more service members who get bad grades to repay their tuition money with out-of-pocket cash.

Under the new rules, troops taking undergraduate courses will have to achieve a grade of C or higher or else they will be subject to “recoupment” and have to retroactively pay the class’s costs.

Previous rules required only that service members pass the class — and even that lower standard impacted thousands of service members. For example, last year the services recouped tens of millions of dollars from at least 59,000 service members who signed up for TA-funded classes but failed to complete them with a passing grade.